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driving miss nicoley
May. 28th, 2004 05:59 pmso, i go to visit Lorie at her place of work (NJ Office of Information Technology) and all is going well at that point. as soon as my visit is over however, i make my first mistake by thinking my car is in section 2C of the parking garage though i had actually parked on 3C. sigh. after several moments of panic i finally found it and started on my way to Princeton. yeah, right. if only it were so easy. Lorie gave me directions to Route 1 North, but of course i botched them up and missed a turn or something and eventually wound up on River Road which i at least recognized because it's on the way to church, so i basically went almost to the Unitarian Universalist Church at Washington Crossing (instead stopping at Washington Crossing State Park, but pretty much same diff) and then i figured at least i could get home from there, right? oh how very, very wrong. i make it across the trauma of the skinny, skinny bridge and then miss the left turn i need to take to get home, i'd like to say that i was so traumatized by scraping along the edge of the bridge a bit that that's why i missed the turnoff, but let's face it, it's has a lot more to do with me being an idiot and not paying enough attention to where the car was going the zillions of times p.u.'s drove home from church. ok, so i convince myself that i can get home by going straight and i end up in Upper Makefield and Newtown (a part of it i don't recognize, of course) after turning around about 5 times i finally, somehow end of in Wrightstown. shockingly enough, this turns out to be a good thing. because i find myself at this intersection that i recognize from driving home from the grange fair. i am thus able to get home without too much difficulty (except for the part where i wasn't in the proper lane for turning left onto Stony Hill but that was fixed pretty quickly) so i finally get on Rt. 1 North.
i don't have anymore driving troubles (well maybe a little bit on the way home, but nothing so outrageous) but my next troubles are car related. i had decided not to bother with getting a one-day parking permit like i did last year and just park on the street. though i was lucky enough to find a spot that i did not have to parallel park in, that's where my luck ended. despite what seemed like a really easy parking job (ha!) my car was still just barely within the white lines and it was looking highly likely that it could get hit by a stray car on the crowded road. but it was within the line so i decided i didn't care and went to the meter. here's where i got really stupid.
i put in two quarters and the meter said i had 40 minutes. that seemed like more than enough since i had parked rather close to Firestone library (where i would be filling out forms). the curse of Princeton U struck yet again however, when i had to walk around the entire building in order to find the damn door. and then once inside i couldn't find any stairs to get up to the second floor so that killed time, i finally got directed to the stairs and i have to wait for the HR lady to come back from wherever she was, and at this point i learn that i have to go to another office in order to get my parking pass. now, at this point, the logical course of action would have been to go back to my car and put a few more coins in the meter. good thing i never claimed to be logical. because instead i walk halfway across campus to get my parking pass, only to learn once i'm there that i need to know the license plate number for my car which i of course have memorized and could recite in my sleep. or not. fortunately, after some initial bitchiness, the lady let me get a parking pass so long as i called with the license place number before i used it.
on the up side the place i'm supposed to park is a lot closer to where i'll be working and so i can avoid wandering around campus like an idiot. on the down side, once i make it back across campus, the parking meter has expired and i have a parking ticket. my first ticket ever! oooh! at least they don't put parking tickets on your permanent record. but now instead of a couple more quarters which i should have put in in the frelling first place (or oh, i don't know, gotten a free parking pass and parking in the one of the University's garages?) i have to pay $25. i will of course, simply omit this little detail when speaking with the p.u.'s and i can pay it off online and pretend it never happened. but um yeah, today is nicole is a big frelling idiot day. hopefully it's a once in a life time occurrence and though i may have lapses into stupidity at other points in my life, it will never be quite so many times in a row. because today? was just all kinds of sad and pathetic.
i don't have anymore driving troubles (well maybe a little bit on the way home, but nothing so outrageous) but my next troubles are car related. i had decided not to bother with getting a one-day parking permit like i did last year and just park on the street. though i was lucky enough to find a spot that i did not have to parallel park in, that's where my luck ended. despite what seemed like a really easy parking job (ha!) my car was still just barely within the white lines and it was looking highly likely that it could get hit by a stray car on the crowded road. but it was within the line so i decided i didn't care and went to the meter. here's where i got really stupid.
i put in two quarters and the meter said i had 40 minutes. that seemed like more than enough since i had parked rather close to Firestone library (where i would be filling out forms). the curse of Princeton U struck yet again however, when i had to walk around the entire building in order to find the damn door. and then once inside i couldn't find any stairs to get up to the second floor so that killed time, i finally got directed to the stairs and i have to wait for the HR lady to come back from wherever she was, and at this point i learn that i have to go to another office in order to get my parking pass. now, at this point, the logical course of action would have been to go back to my car and put a few more coins in the meter. good thing i never claimed to be logical. because instead i walk halfway across campus to get my parking pass, only to learn once i'm there that i need to know the license plate number for my car which i of course have memorized and could recite in my sleep. or not. fortunately, after some initial bitchiness, the lady let me get a parking pass so long as i called with the license place number before i used it.
on the up side the place i'm supposed to park is a lot closer to where i'll be working and so i can avoid wandering around campus like an idiot. on the down side, once i make it back across campus, the parking meter has expired and i have a parking ticket. my first ticket ever! oooh! at least they don't put parking tickets on your permanent record. but now instead of a couple more quarters which i should have put in in the frelling first place (or oh, i don't know, gotten a free parking pass and parking in the one of the University's garages?) i have to pay $25. i will of course, simply omit this little detail when speaking with the p.u.'s and i can pay it off online and pretend it never happened. but um yeah, today is nicole is a big frelling idiot day. hopefully it's a once in a life time occurrence and though i may have lapses into stupidity at other points in my life, it will never be quite so many times in a row. because today? was just all kinds of sad and pathetic.
